A residential gateway is a device that acts as a point of access to or from a home network. It can be a simple modem or a more robust device with routing and security features. It allows for the creation of an autonomous system and has its own address. Some devices offer routing, DHCP, NAT, and firewall capabilities.
Residential gateway is a term that has been widely used to identify any device that acts as a single point of access, to or from a home or residential computer network. It is very similar to any other network gateway or edge device, except that its functionality can vary significantly. The term has since been used on everything from a simple modem to more robust equipment that provides routing and security features for a home network.
A device used as a residential gateway is similar, in essence, to a border gateway device used for a larger organization such as a corporate network that controls how two networks interact with each other. Depending on its capabilities, it allows for the creation of what is termed an autonomous system (AS) or network of computers separated from the Internet as a whole by this gateway device. The residential gateway has its own address that it advertises to the world, while the computers and devices that make up the home network have their own internal address structure. While the device can connect a home’s local area network (LAN) with the Internet as a whole, it is also sometimes used when connecting the home LAN with a community’s wide area network (WAN). The larger WAN then has its own gateway to the larger internet.
In its simplest form, the residential gateway is a modem, such as those used by an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to connect to the provider’s service network. In this case, it is only capable of sending network traffic from a personal computer over a specific type of connection, such as telephone line, coaxial cable, radio frequency, and so on, by converting the data into a signal. However, this type of device does not allow for the creation of a home LAN, so if multiple computers within the residence need access to the modem, a setup of one computer to share the Internet connection, or a small switch or hub connected to the modem. The modem type of residential gateway also does not offer security or networking.
Other devices, on the other hand, are sometimes marketed separately and provide other gateway services useful to the home network. Those with routing capabilities will be able to handle tasks such as establishing a LAN using an explicit Internet Protocol (IP) addressing scheme and performing Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) services to streamline networking. To further aid the network, these residential gateways will provide network address translation (NAT), which allows the addresses of certain packets to be changed in order to route those packets entering the LAN via an address to a specific internal address. For security reasons, some devices also offer packet filtering firewall capabilities that further protect your home network from malicious intent.
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